Humans have been experimenting with communes since at least the Roman times, and probably earlier. People have often been fed up with their social arrangement and struck out to make a new society for themselves, typically on a smaller scale. I think that we may be on the cusp, in the USA, of another historic peak in such efforts.

In BLUEPRINT: THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF A GOOD SOCIETY, I review many such efforts over a long sweep of time. But here, I will briefly focus on what we can learn from a sample of 60 urban communes from the 1970’s.

Despite the ebbs and flows of communal movements, the 1965-1975 period in the USA was in a class of its own, with well over 2,000 communes founded per year. Several historically specific factors likely accounted for this, ranging from reactions to the Vietnam War; the extraordinary youth culture and alienation of the 1960s; the new freedoms enjoyed by women (arising from the women’s movement and the invention of the birth control pill); and even the passage of federal food stamp laws that ensured that people joining communes would not starve.

In 1974, sociologist Benjamin Zablocki started a project that followed 60 representative urban communes in the USA for the next 20 years (he also studied 60 rural communes). These communes (in New York City, Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles) ranged from 5 to 67 adults (with an average of 13.4). Like their predecessors through the centuries, the communes attempted to articulate and enact what they felt to be new beliefs and moral convictions. Most of the residents were, however, unknowingly repeating longstanding practices.

Most of the members joined because they felt a sense of stagnation and lack of purpose in their lives, or an alienation from the larger society. Typical descriptions they gave were that “Something was lacking. What was important in life was not being confronted.” Surprisingly, however, when their feelings of alienation and estrangement were quantified and compared to the broader US population, those who joined communes often feltlesseconomic or political alienation. But they seem to have had a greater awareness of, and sensitivity to, personal meaninglessness. And so, most joiners were searching for meaning, and a desire to “reduce the world to a manageable size.” They were not, as sometimes claimed, seeking greater opportunities to practice socially deviant behavior.

The turnover of people in the communes was very high. Over the two-year window from 1974 to 1976, only about a third of the residents were still present at the end of follow-up. The main reason people left, they said, was that they did not feel “loved” by other members of the commune. Of the 60 communes as a whole at the start, 48 (80%) survived for one year, and 38 (63%) survived for two years. Longer-lived communities tended to havemorestringent entrance requirements or probationary periods for new members. In this sample, 77% disintegrated for internal reasons (like ideological schisms, leadership disputes, or sexual tensions) and 23% for external reasons (like legal threats or disasters).

Communes in this period were far from being sexually orgiastic, drug-hazed, and law-breaking enterprises – as is sometimes wrongly assumed. Membership in these groups came with normative pressures to belessextreme. Self-reports of drug use declined from 86% to 42%, public nudity from 40% to 32%, sex with more than one person at a time from 24% to 14%, and participation in riots from 22% to 3%. Even participation in anti-war demonstrations declined from 57% to 9%.

Leadership, along with mild hierarchy, often played a decisive role in the successful operation and endurance of the communes. In one commune, “the charismatic leader motivated a work team of ten hippie men without prior training in construction to build cabins at the astonishing rate of one a day, using poor equipment and often battling terrible weather conditions. The grueling pace of this work was not resented by the members but rather considered to be a valuable spiritual discipline.”

Two other broad factors helped determine group cohesion and success: ideology and structure. By “structure,” I mean both the existence of hierarchy in a group and also, distinctly, thepatternof social relations in in the group (such as whether friendships are reciprocated, or the extent to which people have friends in common – which are the sorts of social network features I myself spend a lot of time studying).

Both ideology and structure are important. Sociologist Stephen Vaisey analyzed these communes to see which ones were better able to generate a sense of a collective self. To what extent did this “we-feeling” in group members arise from structural factors, such as friendship ties, and to what extent from the sharing of ideas and meanings among the members? He found that certain measures of social structure were not enough to produce a sense of belonging on their own. But he found that a shared moral understanding – a unified set of beliefs and a common sense of purpose – was crucial.

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